This week, we will begin to break down our scripts to prepare for scene presentations at mid-term. As you blog this week about your relationship to the practices of substitution, sense memory and emotion memory, think about how your knowledge of the given circumstances help you identify your character's objectives. How do you use these aforementioned strategies to help you identify and obtain your objectives in a scene? What do you do if you do not have a sense/emotion memory that you can use effectively? As you begin to create a score for your work on the scene, think through the varied ways that particular emotions are presented using your bodies and voices. How many variations of a particular "doing" do you play with before you make a decision about your actions and tactics in a scene. Play with your ideas when we do improv work in class. Keep them in your character history file. You never know what will go into the final score.
When I first read my scene I viewed my character in a completely different light than I do now. I've only begun work on trying to see who I am as this person and just by working with the character two times I am still trying to place her. I have begun to really try and start figuring out her desires such as wanting to get married, wanting to get him up and moving, and wanting to belong. I have not been in a relationship like this one in my own life so instead of trying to find one particular moment to relate, I have been trying to find smaller instances of wanting something from a partner and how I felt then. I am also trying to take off my "actor hat" b/c I am always self-conscious about acting and not being. I'm hoping to start break that down more to make myself seem more honest in my art.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that was mentioned in class last week was the act of crossing out 'drama' or 'comedic' and playing it out how you feel. I really enjoy that idea because I know sometimes I may trap myself into those words and trying to play for the comedy when it is a serious moment and vise versa. One of the things I struggle with as an actor is trying something new every day I work with the script. Sometimes I surprise myself when my voice reflects a certain way and I almost wonder, where did it come from? I didn't plan for it to happen. However, I realize that is the beauty in it all; I did not plan for it to happen. Just because I cannot relate to my character's father being Latino and coming from Mexico City, I can relate to having friends who don't quite understand where you are coming from and assume you are always like them. I think that is one of the greatest things about acting is even though we may not ever experience the situations/responsibilities/troubles of our characters, we can always find a human emotion to relate it to with ourselves and hopefully play the truth in that.
ReplyDeleteTo me substitution is just playing make believe. Every child grows up using substitution except we call it pretending. If you think about all of acting is substitution. We substitute the the stage for Macbeth's castle. We substitute the lights for the sun and so on. For me it's almost a no brainer. I don't deal with sense memory or emotional memory. It's something that we talk about all the time in class but no one ever teaches us how to access sense memory or emotional memory. I have had one class period where we did an exercise developed by Strasberg and then we never did another drill again. For me it is hard to just conjure up the emotions from a memory and then substitute them into a scene. I would be interested in learning how to apply this technique but for now a more physical approach works better for me when I need to draw on emotions. I find using the Chekhov technique of Radiating, Flying, Molding, and Floating give me emotions that I can use in scenes instantaneously. Thinking about expanding or contracting also gives me emotional responses. For example with Sergius in Arms when Nicola comes into the room I contract me sense of touch and smell. By doing this I get this feeling of being a huge snob and it reflex in my body as well as my emotions. When I need to get angry at Louka I rise internally and then radiate that out into the house until my body starts to shake from the rage. I find that by working physically that I can leave the feeling behind a lot easier than I could if I was working with an emotional memory because it is not an actual emotion tied to my personal life. It's just a mental image or what Chekhov calls a Psychological Gesture.
ReplyDeleteOften times, when I read through a scene, the given circumstances are clearer to me through the dialogue, rather than through italicized blocking or character descriptions. I've always believed in paying extra close attention to the way sentences are formed and particular attention to punctuation. Commas, ellipses, everything can help you identify objective. It all helps me picture in my head a few possible choices for how to score a particular moment. As a young, quite inexperienced actor as well as person, I find quite often that a sense or emotion memory escapes me. In the past, I've tended to shy away from trying desparately to come up with some memory to aid me in depicting a sense or emotion, but rather went with a 'here and now' approach. I've learned that such an approach can be very raw and uncontrollable. So I'd like to try opting for a form of compromise. Rather than evoking a specific memory, I'd like to try taking each change in my future score and relating it to a very general sense or emotion. Then, as we did in exercises, just muse about how I feel about said sense or emotion. Then put it into context of the character. With those associations, thoughts, and feelings attributed to a particular part of my score, I hope to be able to have a greater control over my range.
ReplyDeleteLearning to use substitution has been the most useful tool as an actor for me thus far. As I learn and grown as an actor I like to look back at earlier roles I have played, and think how I could have done things differently if I used then what I know now. One particular role that I struggled with always sticks out in my mind. When I got the role I felt that I had nothing in common with the character, and that I would never behave the way “she” behaved. In short, I judged her. This created a road block for me that I was never able to fully over come. I know now that that was all wrong. If only I had used substitution. My character was supposed to be scared for her life due to her boyfriend’s ex-wife attempt to murder her boyfriend and her. Well, I’ve been very scared before, and I have had boyfriends. Most definitely not the same thing, but certainly experiences and emotions I could have easily drawn from and substituted for the ones of my character. Now when I get a new character I am always very excited to look to my own life and pull from it. Last spring in Acting I, I was Becca in Rabbit Hole, for my final scene performance. Now I have never lost a child, but I have had experience of loss and I was able use those experience for substitution. I am also married, and was able to draw from my life and apply it to my character.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first get a script, I read it through and see it as if it is a movie happening. I am a very visual person so if I can’t see it in my mind I can’t connect to it and chances are I won’t remember it. So when I see this movie play out I try to take what the people in “the movie” are doing and make it my own. So the emotion I can usually grasp or borrow another very close emotion and attempt to morph it into something that will work for the part. The one thing I could do better is play with it more when I get these short films in my head. I need to start letting go of what comes to mind first, so I can let in a newer better version of myself acting/performing the part. The good thing about me seeing this play out in my mind is that I can very much feel the emotion when I read it and from there I do my best to embody that emotion while I’m trying to take what is in my head and make it what people see. So myself note from this blog is to take more time to work around what I see in my head for the part and make it something I don’t even expect.
ReplyDeleteDanielle Cooper
ReplyDelete“Playing the Character”
Feb. 18. 2010
In the last class when we began our midterm scenes, I think I reached a point when I had to stop the acting and start to respond like Danielle would, not just my character in the scene. I think that I was “putting my acting face on” because I think I really identify with this character. I saw so much of me in the way that my part for example like how she asked questions about who likes her and why don’t people respond to her. I think that I saw so much of myself that I tried to hide it behind a character, so that I really wouldn’t show how I seek others approval. For the first time, I think that I am going to search for my character through my personal experiences with people, and my voice because I think that the character will come off more genuine. This was a hard realization to come to but I think that this character hit home and gives me a chance to put a lot of myself out there that no one has seen before. It is really weird because Hagen even says, “to find myself” in a part. I think this definitely means that I need to take off the performance and just do me.
Collin Stephens
ReplyDeleteJust reading a scene myself gives me a completely different impression of my character than when I am able to act it out with my scene partner. Usually when I start a scene I want to resort to some familiar, comfortable character, which is probably comedic. It was helpful to me doing the scene with no decisions made of what kind of character I wanted to be yet. I wasn’t trying to be sad, I wasn’t trying to be funny, I was just trying to speak the lines. What really helped me with this was the audience’s reaction to my character. At some parts, people laughed at what I said even when I wasn’t trying to be funny, which makes me think that my character is serious but in a sarcastic way which makes him a comedic role. But also, the type of character that I want to be depends on my objectives in the scene which are rarely stated in the given circumstances. So it’s up to me to find out what I’m trying to do in the scene.
The concepts of sense memory, emotion memory and substitution all fall under the broader category of imagination, for me. I know this is unconventional, and possibly even “wrong,” but even when I’m drawing off of an experience I’ve had previously (via any of the three methods) I feel that it gives me an extra degree of separation from my character than I would like.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is not to say that I don’t use these techniques, I most certainly do; however, I prefer to leave them somewhat in the planning stages and not in the execution. I believe this helps me to not falter in the moment, though of course I could in practice be wrong.
For this particular piece, I’ve thought back to the many times I’ve been interviewed by prospective employers and the peculiar demeanors they’ve had. I myself have never interviewed anyone, so I have to think of what it was like on the other side of the table, and turn it around.
When I begin to look at a script the first thing that I used to do was to immediately make decisions as I was reading. This is a habit I’ve tried to stop because instead of helping me get a jump on the process it actually slows me down because it may or may not be appropriate for the scene. By making these judgments so early I hinder myself because like a bad habit I might have to go back and change the approach which will be harder to do now that I already had something in mind. Now, when I pick up a script I read through it a few times and slowly try to decide what type of people are in the scene and what I can relate to first. When it comes to action of some kind, I try to think about when I’ve done the same or similar action and how it felt and how it looked. I practice doing that action a few times, and then I try to imagine the different emotional approaches that it could have in the scene. I think about how they all different from each other and what change will show in the physical aspect of the scene. I normally keep all my options open, or try to, until I have a more solid grasp on who the character is. If I don’t have a personal relation to the action or context of the situation or action, I try to think about a close second to that. If I can’t find anything personal about it, I try to think about someone close to me and their experience with it. It can be difficult to find the right, believable response but I try to find SOMETHING to put in, as long as it’s appropriate.
ReplyDeleteMegan Kane
ReplyDeleteFebruary 22, 2010
When I first received my scene, I read through it without putting a certain character into it. I am using my past-experiences to really relate to my scene. I have not done my cold read yet, I think this exercise will really help me figure out my scene. Emotion memory and sense memory are really helping me think hard about my scene. I think I know who I am and what my objective is, however, I feel there is a wall between me and my script. I am going to really search and figure out what my scene is about so I can break down that wall and perform the scene to its full potential.
Adrian Stuhlfelner
ReplyDeleteBlog Comment V
The suspension of disbelief of the audience towards the actor enables the performer to appear realistic although the audience knows that all actions happening on stage are not actually happening but mimetic. Theater needs drama to make what's happening on stage worth watching. Something important the audience can identify with needs to happen or the observer will lose interest. Thus it is of course not always just the objective to appear naturalistic as an actor. The so called cheat sometimes overemphasizes or underlines the meaning of the conversation or monologue, some playwrights write and, perhaps more important, wrote in a poetic manure instead of prose and actions are on stage usually not as casual as in real life, but defined more clearly. Actors in movies usually have the goal to appear very alike to reality even if they do unrealistic things like fighting aliens or flying like Superman. In an elaborate movie it always seems as though it could be possible like it is observed from the audience. Movies are rated because children think they are real and that can be scary. The fascination of film depends on a virtual scenario that makes us believe is reality in the moment we are watching. Theater is different from movies in that way. It doesn't need to appear naturalistic, on the one hand because it is impossible and one the other hand because it is not necessary because not expected by the audience. The fantasy of the audience is needed in order to imagine the story become reality. The observer may imagine himself as part of the plot and thinking about what he would do in the character's place. The actor helps the observer by appearing natural, taking his actions serious (no matter if comedic or not) and plays as though it was happening and believe in what he is saying no matter how politically incorrect or weird it might seem. With this kind of inspiration and help provided by the interpretation of the actor, the audience will be able to let their imagination run wild. The way an actor usually achieves to appear natural (not naturalistic!) is by Emotion Memory, Sense Memory and substitution. It all starts with observation and experience of life. The actor observes actions, habits and behavior in general on himself and people who are close to him as well as strangers. Then during the probe he is confronted with given circumstances. He remembers situations he has been in that are similar to the situation the character is facing and adds his Emotion and Sense Memory to the characters nature. Thus the character is a symbioses of the actor's personality and the actor's and director's interpretation of the character invented by the playwright. If the actor is facing a situation on stage he has never experienced in real life ha has to be creative about his reaction. The magic “if” very important just like it is for substitution. I usually think about what I'd do and how I'd behave if I'd be in that kind of situation. Very simple but usually effective.
The Miss von Bernberg is spelled wrong. It's not Fraülen but Fräulen von Bernberg.
[This is the blog entry I had the most difficulties with so far. That's why I thought intensely about it and came up with quiet a few ideas I figured are all worth mentioning. Thus it turned out to be pretty long...]
For my midterm scene, my character was in a situation that I could not even begin to relate to: he had a “hand grenade embedded in his rectal cavity.” I decided to take a physical approach. In rehearsal I experimented with what I imagined it would feel like. I let it affect my movement and my voice. I worked hard to make it as convincing as possible. It’s kind of funny because I was afraid of being faced with a situation of not being able to access sense/emotion memory. But instead of letting it get to me, I just brainstormed different ways to approach the character and the physical idea just seemed to click. After a while, I discovered more and more ways to deliver certain lines and to truly get in the head of my character. Aside from the physical dilemma he was in, he was extremely embarrassed with the whole situation. I kept finding new layers and mixing them together.
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